Most of the posts in this meme have talked about what makes their language fast, this is the first I’ve seen that talks about what makes the language slow. And it does it in an interesting, insightful way. Kudos!

How closely does the gabage collector mirror the paper that introduced that introduced it?

Great write-up! It made me curious about how Racket would fare.

This 40 line Racket program is within about an order of magnitude of the wc implementation on my machine:

~/Downloads> time -l wc big.txt
  128457 1095695 6488666 big.txt
        0.03 real         0.02 user         0.00 sys
   1871872  maximum resident set size
         0  average shared memory size
         0  average unshared data size
         0  average unshared stack size
       467  page reclaims
         1  page faults
         0  swaps
         0  block input operations
         0  block output operations
         0  messages sent
         0  messages received
         0  signals received
         4  voluntary context switches
        54  involuntary context switches

~/Downloads> time -l racket wc.rkt big.txt
  128457 1095695 6488666 big.txt
        0.17 real         0.14 user         0.02 sys
  33656832  maximum resident set size
         0  average shared memory size
         0  average unshared data size
         0  average unshared stack size
      9269  page reclaims
         0  page faults
         0  swaps
         0  block input operations
         0  block output operations
         0  messages sent
         0  messages received
         0  signals received
         0  voluntary context switches
       592  involuntary context switches

Though the comparison is a little unfair to Racket here since most of that time is startup time for the Racket VM and the run time is short enough that the JIT doesn’t really get to kick in. Are the larger test files mentioned in the Go and Haskell posts available anywhere? I’d like to see how this program does against those.